I gladly pass along Dr. E. Calvin Beisner's observations about (among other things) recent misinformation concerning how evangelicals are dealing with global warming. Good stuff here. (Dr. Beisner, who I have referred to frequently here at Vital Signs, is the national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.)In an article posted October 13 in the "On Faith" department of WashingtonPost.com, David Waters reports on the debate among evangelicals about global warming. He is right that evangelicals are divided, and he rightly reports that, according to a Barna survey released last month, 90 percent of evangelicals want Christians to take a more active role in caring for the environment but 60 percent are concerned that proposed solutions could hurt the poor. In fact, 65 percent think the media reports are overly hyped, and 62 percent believe that cyclical climate change is not primarily caused by human activity.
But after that, the article gets things effectively backward on several fronts. Most seriously, Waters misidentifies an “Urgent Call to Action” as a statement of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). In fact, the January 2007 “Urgent Call” was issued by a dozen or so evangelicals (including Richard Cizik, the NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs), acting in their private capacities.
Waters's mixup is understandable, because for years Cizik has consistently failed to make it clear when he speaks for himself and when he speaks for his employer. In the winter of 2005, Cizik tried to persuade the NAE board to endorse a statement on global warming. The board refused. Instead, the NAE's executive committee issued a statement saying, in part, "Recognizing the ongoing debate regarding the causes and origins of global warming, and understanding the lack of consensus among the evangelical community on this issue, the NAE Executive Committee, while affirming our love for the Creator and His creation, directs the NAE staff to stand by and not exceed in any fashion our approved and adopted statements concerning the environment contained within the Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” If honored, this motion would have ended Cizik’s aggressive climate change advocacy.
The NAE’s "Call to Civic Responsibility," a seminal statement on evangelicals and public life that was co-authored by Christians who disagreed on many secondary issues, never even mentions global warming or climate change, let alone takes a position on it. That’s why, as the article notes, prominent evangelical leaders with a wide spectrum of views on global warming all were happy to sign on.
Backers of Cizik’s failed global warming position then formed their own organization, the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), and issued "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action" in February, 2006. The Cornwall Alliance published a point-by-point rebuttal in "A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming" in August, 2006.
Despite the setback and ignoring his own board’s official motion, Cizik continued to promote urgent action on global warming, frequently representing the NAE as endorsing his personal position. In late 2006 he participated in a retreat with Harvard scientist Eric Chivian and others that led to issuance of the "Urgent Call." The NAE never endorsed that document, either, and board chairman L. Roy Taylor stated that the “Urgent Call” did not come from the NAE or its board.
The quotations Waters cites as from the NAE's "Call to Civic Responsibility" (". . . human-induced climate change is real . . . We are convinced that evangelicals must engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity's responsibility to address it," and "Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.") actually came from the ECI--the document the NAE refused to endorse.
Finally, Waters's article describes the WeGetIt.org campaign as "a direct response” to the “Urgent Call." The WeGetIt.org Declaration is not a response to any document, but merely a general statement of a widely held evangelical view on creation stewardship and global warming. The campaign centers on a simple 150-word declaration by which Christians can show that they are concerned about the environment and the poor, and aren’t convinced by media hype about global warming. To date it’s been endorsed by thousands of pastors, Christian leaders, policy-makers, and theologians, as well as a growing host of national and state organizations. Chuck Colson, James Dobson, and Richard Land are merely among the most prominent of its supporters.
The WeGetIt.org Declaration contradicts the story of evangelicals embracing the cause of stopping global warming that’s been carefully cultivated by a handful of prominent leaders in recent years, but it is entirely uncontroversial among rank and file evangelicals and, we believe, represents the mainstream of evangelical thought on these issues. The recent Barna poll merely bears out what studies have been showing right along (a recent study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Calvin College’s 2008 National Survey on Religion and Public Life, and two Barna studies last winter): that evangelicals are the most skeptical segment in the American population about the human causes of climate change and about claims of its catastrophic effects.
